Understanding the analytics
The biostatistician behind the Peabody Award-winning racial discrimination investigation
The investigative project by Newsday, Long Island Divided, which explored racial discrimination in home buying on Long Island, New York, won a Peabody Award for Public Service Investigative Journalism, one of the highest honors in media. The award-winning team includes Isabel Elaine Allen, PhD, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the UCSF School of Medicine, who served as the statistical expert, designed the study and did much of the analysis.
Photo credit: Newsday
What about that Neanderthal DNA?
When Tony Capra came to UCSF from Vanderbilt, he brought with him a body of bioinformatic-based research exploring what the Neanderthal DNA identified in the modern human genome can tell us about early human evolution. In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in July 2020, Capra and colleagues showed that when Neanderthals reproduced with members of the small group of Homo sapiens who had relatively recently migrated from Africa into Eurasia, the Neanderthals reintroduced thousands of gene variants that the small migrating group had left behind in Africa. Those genes fared better in what become the modern human genome than Neanderthal gene variants not present in the original African Homo sapiens population. Capra’s work was featured in a documentary on our Neanderthal ancestry that aired on Canadian public television – and may be eventually distributed by PBS.
Photo credit: The Real Neanderthal documentary
Katie Pollard Named 2020 ISCB Fellow
The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) has named Katie Pollard, PhD, a 2020 ISCB Fellow. She was selected for being a “world leader in developing statistical models and open-source bioinformatics software for biological big data, with an emphasis on genomics.” Pollard was one of 12 nominees who were elected this year as fellows. Pollard, a professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, directs of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology, which was launched in 2018 in response to the changing landscape of biomedical research.
Photo: Katie Pollard, PhD / courtesy of Gladstone Institutes
